For the last week we’ve been watching you make things up, gesticulate and hallucinate. You’re talking nonsense. You’re panicking. You’re completely out to lunch. You speak only to yourself, and to your retired captive audience in front of the telly. Your authority is inexistent. To be respected, you still have to be respectable. The terrifying truth which you’ve tried to cover up for the last week is simple. The 17th October was the most joyous, the most lighthearted, the most playful and the most polite insurrection that has ever existed. Even your police admit it . They qualified that insurrection as a combination of the Paris Commune and Black Friday. You were so afraid, that for the last week you flailed around in mid air trying to intimidate us, terrify us, make us sad. You can resuscitate the ORTF ¹ all you like, everyone can see the Emperor has shit clothes. 

So what? Did you really think that no wild demo would ever reach the corner of the rue de l’Elysée where Edmond de Rothschild’s company, the American embassy, and the Cercle interallié² overlap? Did you really think that the last inhabitants of Bernard Arnault’s³ Paris, would be happy forever with their status as domestic servants, as extras on the fashion set? Did you think we’d let you pick our pockets for an eternity to embellish your obscene window display of luxury? 

“But what do they have in their minds?” asks your pervert-in-chief. So we’ll explain it to you. 

What happened last Saturday is that we saw, for the first time in this gerontocratic society, all young people, regardless of background or of class, take to the streets of the city centre, simply because they know they’re promised to the same destiny of proletarianisation. The young are of course a minority in this society, but unfortunately for you, it’s one that’s still alive. We understand you were afraid, you who has never experienced anything except the steps of a career. The theme of the day was la vie chére [the high cost of living]. You’ll surely admit that looting Chanel is the most direct solution to this shared problem. If you have another one we’d love to hear it, but it doesn’t seem like you do. The way you take pity on the small businesses, those same ones you pushed to bankruptcy with your platform-capital friends, is obviously fooling no-one. We recommend, for your governance, that you read, at long last, that which figures in your French national library under the header of “national treasure”. Especially that little brochure: The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy.

There was no “security fiasco” on 17 October. There was an insurrection, that’s to say the abolition of the demonstration as a regulated and more or less funerary parade, from point A to point B. The city-centres, full of crowds, had simply way too many people, and far too much joy, for any police apparatus to do anything about them. That day, no-one had the heart to demonstrate. The words of the day were “blockade République”, “blockade Bellecour”. You didn’t “lose control.” From now on we know that if you still seem to have any, it’s only because we held back.

Your very response to October 17 proves us right: new lockdowns, new curfews, and even new self-authorisations all because we at last took the streets. Your grotesqueness has really no limits, what else is that than just more reason to take the streets again? And stop all that about the “ultra left,” we didn’t see Gilles Dauvé in the street on the 17th October. However, we did see Naruto and Captain America, Spiderman and the Ninja Turtles, Gandalf and Luffy. Everyone was there. There were anarchists singing the Marseillaise, and people charging at lines of riot cops with their bare hands and their laughter. There were kids playing with water cannons, as if they were at Aquapolis. There was a youth that had at last stopped “suffering psychologically.” You may try everything to reinstate the sadness, without which no government is possible. You can try putting your train of electoral manipulations on the rails towards human stupidity. You’ll never take the joy that we experienced away from us. The only real popular expression is in the street. Leave the ballot boxes to the undertakers. Set fire to the headquarters of senility!

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